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Thursday, 12 November 2015

Being Great, the Steinbeck Way - Ruth Hatfield

Being Great, the Steinbeck way - Ruth Hatfield

I haven’t been out much recently, mainly due to having a
book to finish. Having just clambered to the finishing line of the eighty-first
draft of my manuscript, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering ‘how did I get into this in the first
place?’ and ‘is it time to paint that wall a different colour?’. Decorating aside, this soul-searching resulted
in a bit of dwelling on the subject of writers’ journals, which have often instructed,
inspired and reassured me.

The first one I could remember reading was the
incredible ‘Journal of a Novel’ by John Steinbeck, and I knew it had made a
deep impression but I couldn’t quite remember why. So I took it off the shelf and
had another look.

I’m not sure if it's just the rule that everyone has to go through a Steinbeck obsession
in their late teens, but I did, and it was wonderful – he stoked my outrage
about the pitilessness of the world, swept me along with his passion and made
me feel as though I were sitting by the fire with him, being told stories to
inspire me to write a new world. His writing was clear, effortless and
enlightening. I was in awe.

After going through my must-write-like-Steinbeck period
(manuscripts now safely lining moles’ nests), I realised that I couldn’t write
like him, but that I should never feel afraid to write about the things that
inspired passion in me. And as I opened ‘Journal of a Novel’ again, I
discovered the roots of this self-belief.

The book is a collection of letters that Steinbeck wrote to
his friend and editor, Pascal Covici, during the time that he was writing the
first draft of East of Eden. He wrote a letter every day before beginning work,
putting down whatever thoughts were in his mind – a process familiar to many of
us in our daily writing lives. Except that Steinbeck, having already written
The Grapes of Wrath, surely enough of a classic hit for anyone’s lifetime, also
states from the very beginning that he is setting out to write the greatest
book he will ever write.

‘I have written each book as an exercise, as practice for
the one to come. And this is the one to come’, he says.

No caveats.

So far so good, he’s John Steinbeck and he knows he is a
great writer. He can say such things.

But then he starts writing it, and of course the process for
him is the same as it is for the rest of us. He agonises over putting down the
first line. He gets distracted by creating huge and enormous similies, one of
my favourite being:

‘No matter what I do, the story is always there – waiting and
working kind of like a fermenting mash out of which whiskey will be made
eventually but meanwhile the mass bubbles and works and makes foam, and it is
very interesting but the product that is wished for… is the whiskey. All the
turmoil and boiling is of no interest to anyone’.

And incredibly, he has good days and bad days, about which
he can only say ‘I don’t understand why some days are wide open and others
closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still
are days which worry’. I think at eighteen, I saw that as a surprising weakness
in such a great writer…

‘Journal of a Novel’ is full of pithy
sense and observations that I ought to embroider and hang over my desk – like most writers' journals, it’s a
fascinating book about the mental process of writing a novel. But where this one differs, I think, is that there is such clarity of
vision in it. Steinbeck says he will do something great, then he rambles and has doubts and changes his mind, but you never believe, really, that he is fumbling
around in the dark, no matter how much he tells you that he might be. His aim
is to write the book that contains ‘all in the
world I know and…everything in it of which I am capable’.

When I read ‘Journal of a Novel’ aged eighteen, the tone of conviction grabbed at me: Steinbeck said he was going to write a great
book, and he did it. And in writing these letters, he lets us see a little of
the drive and the humility and the inspired grinding away that led him to do
it.

In my edition, the quote chosen for the back is the one I’m now
definitely going to embroider and put on my wall: ‘in utter loneliness a writer
tries to explain the inexplicable… If he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t
be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the
impossible’.

6 comments:

Sounds the kid of book that cheers the soul when the work's not going well. But such confidence, over all. Not to mention how supportive it must be to have an agent one can contact every day. Interesting post, Ruth!

Thanks for the comments! An interesting point about his great books - I guess it's the story he wanted most to tell, but maybe not the story he told best... a very interesting point, actually! I'm going to go and ponder on that one...